GETTING THE VOTE New book highlights Massachusetts suffragettes

By Valerie A. Russo/For The Patriot Ledger

Saturday

Mar 31, 2018 at 7:45 AM

Massachusetts women were leaders in the fight for women’s suffrage, an 80-year struggle that culminated in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. But you’d never know about their importance from reading most history books, said Newton author and history buff Barbara Berenson.

“Most books about the suffrage movement have adopted the narrative that it’s all about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and really neglected the extraordinary work of Lucy Stone and her daughter and all the other women in Massachusetts,” Berenson said.

Berenson gives Bay State women the credit they deserve in her new book, “Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement: Revolutionary Reformers,” to be published April 9, 2018 by The History Press. The 189-page paperback provides an overview of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States and 11 chapters detailing the grueling process. Throughout the book are vintage photographs of the leaders of the suffrage movement and political cartoons promoting women’s suffrage. Check out the cartoon on page 93 by Easton artist Blanche Ames, whose fieldstone mansion and surrounding acres are now Borderland State Park.

The story begins in Massachusetts, with women lecturing publicly on political issues for the first time. The topic wasn’t women’s suffrage – it was slavery, which some women considered their moral duty to oppose. “As women, as wives, as mothers, we are deeply responsible for the influence we have on the human race,” wrote Weymouth abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman, a leader of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, whom Berenson quotes in Chapter 1. Chapman organized the first convention of antislavery women, which was held in New York City in 1837.

In Chapter 2, Berenson introduces Lucy Stone, one of the most influential Massachusetts women in the suffrage movement. Stone, a West Brookfield native, was a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Although hired to protest slavery, she renegotiated her contract to include both anti-slavery lectures and lectures on women’s rights. She gave her first speech in support of women’s rights at a church in Gardner, in 1847, launching women’s rights as a movement.

To rally support for women’s rights, local conventions were held in Seneca Falls and Rochester, N.Y., in 1848 and the first national convention was held in Worcester, in 1850. But during the Civil War, leaders of the movement – Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone – put women’s rights on hold and supported the Union war effort to end slavery. After the war, they expected men abolitionists to support giving women the vote, but it didn’t happen.

“Suffragists had to persuade men, who had all the power, to share this power,” Berenson explained. “This required women, who had no legal rights, to foment a successful revolution and overturn long-established religious, domestic and legal traditions. No wonder it took so long.”

Suffragists also had to persuade women to support their cause. Many – including some who had opposed slavery on moral grounds and who supported education for women – thought women should stay out of politics and not be given the vote.

There were disagreements within the women’s suffrage movement, too. When the Fifteenth Amendment was proposed to give black men the vote, Stanton and Anthony opposed it, but continued to fight for a women’s suffrage amendment. In Chapter 3, there’s a quote from Stanton: “I seek universal suffrage, but if that is denied, women deserve suffrage before black men.”

In contrast, the Massachusetts group led by Stone supported the Fifteenth Amendment, concentrating efforts at the state level. Wyoming was first to grant voting rights to women, in 1869, when it was still a territory, followed by other Western states.

“Many historians criticized Lucy Stone’s state-based work, that it wasn’t as worthwhile as seeking a national amendment. Lucy Stone was a radical – she wanted a national amendment, but she was also a realist. She understood that the only way you were going to get a federal amendment was through the labor-intensive work of winning states and, therefore, winning their Congressmen and their Senators. Lucy Stone, in my mind, emerges as the ultimate hero,” Berenson said.

The major publication for women’s rights and suffrage was the Woman’s Journal, founded by Stone in Boston in 1870. An early editor was Mary Livermore, a former Duxbury teacher, who forged connections between the still-small suffrage movement and the larger temperance movement.

The Fifteenth Amendment divided suffragists into two groups – the New York-based National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Stanton and Anthony, and the Massachusetts-based American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Stone. This schism lasted 20 years. Stone’s daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, continued her mother’s work and eventually brought the two sides together with the formation of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Another leader for women’s suffrage was Maud Wood Park, who founded the College Equal Suffrage League in Boston in 1900 to bring educated women into the suffrage movement. African-American women also campaigned for women’s suffrage, led by Boston suffragist and civil rights activist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, editor of the first newspaper published by and for African-American women.

It took three generations of women fighting for suffrage and reaching out to other groups – abolitionists, temperance activists, new immigrants and trade unionists – to get the Nineteenth Amendment passed by the House and Senate and ratified in 36 states.

“Many people might have the view that women’s suffrage was inevitable in 1920, but it wasn’t. The suffrage story is about how incredibly hard it is to achieve change and win the vote – when you don’t have the vote,” Berenson said.

So, the lesson to be learned is – adjust your strategy and tactics to the times, leave your ego at home, and don’t give up.

“We should never relinquish hope or concede defeat in our efforts to make the world more just,” she said. “The suffrage story also reminds us that we should never take the right to vote for granted. It must be protected and defended.”

Berenson said she's always been a history lover. She has written two other works of historical nonfiction: “Boston in the Civil War: Hub of the Second Revolution” (The History Press 2014), and “Walking Tours of Civil War Boston: Hub of Abolitionism” (The Freedom Trail Foundation 2011, 2nd ed. 2014). She also co-edited “Breaking Barriers: The Unfinished Story of Women Lawyers and Judges in Massachusetts”

“I have loved visiting historical sites, reading history and thinking about history. It was always in the back of my mind that I would like to try to write history, but it got delayed for a long time, due to the pressures of a day job and raising my children. I turned to it when the younger of my two children was in high school.”

She will talk about her latest book, “Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement,” at the Statewide Convention of the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts on April 28 and at the Massachusetts Historical Society on June 6. For more author events, see http://www.womansuffragema.com/events.html

DID YOU KNOW?

Women’s suffrage never won the popular vote in Massachusetts. It was voted down in 1895 and 1915. Bay State women gained full suffrage with ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.

In 1879, Massachusetts women won the right to vote in school committee elections. Married women had to register under their married names. Lucy Stone, who kept her maiden name, was not allowed to vote.

New Zealand was the first country in which women had universal suffrage, in 1893.

In Russia, women gained full suffrage in 1917, after revolutionaries deposed the Czar.

Next time you go to Nantasket Beach, picture this: In 1909, when officials forbade suffragists from speaking on Nantasket Beach, suffragists carried their “Votes for Women” banner into the water and spoke from the sea to the audience on the shore. It was one of many public events in Massachusetts inspired by the suffrage activities taking place in England.